The present invention relates to a portable pen pointing device and a processing or computer system with pen pointing device. More particularly, the present invention relates to a portable pointing device which has the form of a portable pen and is handled like a pen to input information to a processing system body and a processing system which receives information input using such a portable pen pointing device.
In recent years, there has been proposed a processing system using a pen pointing device which inputs information by making a trace on a tablet or the like as a pen traces or depicts a character or figure (hereinafter referred to as a processing system with pen pointing device).
The processing system with pen pointing device includes a pen pointing device which is handled like a pen by a user and a processing system body which receives information by detecting and interpreting the handling of the pen pointing device by the user (hereinafter referred to as pen handling).
The processing system body detects the pen handling by receiving an electromagnetic wave transmitted from a pen point of the pen pointing device or detecting a position at which the pen point presses a tablet. Using a dictionary for pen handling interpretation, the processing system body interprets the detected pen handling as an instruction including the input or deletion of a character or figure, the correction of a document, and so on.
A method of interpreting the pen handling on the basis of the dictionary for pen handling interpretation is disclosed by, for example, "BASIC CHARACTER/FIGURE RECOGNITION TECHNIQUES" written by Shunji Mori and published by The OHM sha Ltd.
A specific example will be explained in reference to FIGS. 9 and 10 in conjunction with the case where a hand-written character is interpreted from its trace. Though an example using a Japanese character is explained herein, the same holds for another language.
Referring to FIG. 9, the trace of a handwritten character 200 is sampled through division by a lattice (step 201) to extract lines of vertical, horizontal and oblique directions as strokes (step 202).
The extracted strokes are correlated with one item of a dictionary for pen handling interpretation, for example, an item 302 shown in FIG. 10. Namely, each extracted stroke is compared with a stroke of the corresponding direction in a trace column 303 of an item content 301 and the result of comparison is numerically quantized as the degree of correlation (step 203). The summation of numeric values for the respective strokes as the degrees of correlation is produced to provide the degree of matching of the hand-written character 200 for the item 302 (step 204).
The processings of steps 203 and 204 are performed for all items of the dictionary for pen handling interpretation (step 206) and an item having the greatest degree of matching is determined (step 207). And, a character code of the determined item is output (step 208). For example, in the case of the shown hand-written character 200, it has the greatest degree of matching with the item "z,1" (kanji meaning "book" in English) and a character code of "z,1" is output.
In the example shown above, the hand-written character is recognized from the trace of a pen handling. Actually, writing order information, writing pressure information and speed information are collected or acquired in addition to the trace information in order to reduce an error of interpretation by taking those information into consideration. For that purpose, writing order information, writing pressure information and speed information are described in the corresponding columns of the item content 301, as shown in FIG. 10. In the writing pressure column or the speed column, the strength of writing pressure or the the magnitude of speed is graphed in a direction orthogonal to the stroke.
A user's pen handling is subjective to the user's penmanship/handwritting. Therefore, a user defined item 402 is provided in the dictionary for pen handling interpretation, as shown in FIG. 11.
Since the user defined item 402 is defined by the user, it is possible to reflect the user's specific penmanship/handwriting. For example, in an item content 401 compared with the item content 301, the user's specific penmanship/handwritting is reflected in the direction of the fifth writing order.
The same explanation holds for instructions of correction including "selection" "deletion" and "insertion". Namely, a standard pen handling and a user defined pen handling for each instruction are provided in the dictionary for pen handling interpretation, as shown in FIG. 12.
Thus, a processing system with pen pointing device needs to have a user's specific dictionary for pen handling interpretation in which a user's specific penmanship/handwritting is taken into consideration.
Therefore, a processing system with pen pointing device ordinarily used by a certain user must always be provided with a user's specific dictionary for pen handling interpretation. When that user desires to use a processing system with pen pointing device which he or she does not ordinarily use, it is required that the processing system with pen pointing device reads information from a storage medium such as a flexible disk in which the user's specific dictionary for pen handling interpretation is written.
Accordingly, in the conventional method employed in the case where a certain user uses a processing system with pen pointing device used by another user, it is necessary to make an operation of newly reading information from a flexible disk with a dictionary for pen handling interpretation specific to the certain user into the processing system to be used or an operation of establishing a pen handling environment. As a result, there is a problem that a substantial time or labor or a special knowledge is required.